


The Tadfield Murders: Inspector Lorca

by redsprite



Series: The Tadfield Murders [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternative Universe - Serial Killer, F/M, M/M, will add more tags as needed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:20:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25167589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsprite/pseuds/redsprite
Summary: I always wanted to write a story where Hastur and Ligur fall in love for the first time. Of course, they have to do it at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible AU.
Relationships: Anathema Device/Newton Pulsifer, Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens), Hastur/Ligur (Good Omens), Maude/Leslie (Good Omens), Sergeant Shadwell/Madame Tracy (Good Omens)
Series: The Tadfield Murders [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823206
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll give warnings at the beginning of each chapter where they apply, so if you want to skip the deaths or the sex scenes, you're going to be able to do that. This Chapter: Major Character Death. Because to me, Eric the Disposable Demon will always be a major character.

“Hello, Hastur.”

“What do you want, Eric?”

“Can we just talk? Just for a moment?”

Hastur looked at the young man. He’d never seen him so tense. “You don’t want to talk to me, kid.”

“Please, just two minutes! And then you’ll never have to see me again!”

Hastur hesitated, but then gave in. “Alright. Two minutes. What have you got to say?”

Eric took a deep breath. He nervously shifted his shoulders. “Just that I’m really really sorry. I didn’t want it to end this way. I know you don’t believe me, but I really did like you.”

“I liked you too, Eric.”

Hearing that, some of Eric’s nervous energy seemed to ease. “I’ll totally leave you alone from now on. I just don’t want us to part as enemies. Can we just shake hands and part ways?”

Hastur’s face remained expressionless, he just slowly said: “Sure” and extended his hand.

Eric gave him a handshake, slightly longer than necessary, and then hastily retreated his hand, taking two steps back.

Hastur slowly turned his palm up and brought it closer to his eyes to have a close look at it. A faint golden glow from his palm illuminated his face. His grey irises turned black, and then bigger and bigger, until they almost left no whites of his eyes.

“Now what is this?” he wondered.

Eric tried to back away, but Hastur lifted his other hand and Eric found himself rooted to the spot. He fought against the curse that held him, but he only squirmed helplessly, not going anywhere.

“Is that a sunburst, Eric?” asked Hastur, astonished. “Is that what they look like these days?”

Eric stared at him, starting to panic.

“Eric?” asked Hastur again, still calm, still curious. In his palm, golden lines intertwined to form a round shape, adorned with magical sigils. “Did you just give me a sunburst?”

“I think it’s not working,” choked Eric with what little breath he had left.

“Oh, it is,” said Hastur. “It’s working alright. I just delayed it a little so I can have a look.”

Eric gasped and tried to get away again. “How can you do that?” he sputtered.

Hastur looked up at him for a moment and continued in his calmest voice. “Who told you you can safely give me that? Who sent you to me with this?”

Eric was silent and only shot him a dark glance.

“Eric, I’m trying to make this easier for you. Tell me who sent you.”

“You’re going to kill me anyway, I’d rather not die a traitor.”

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you. You’re going to die, but by your own curse.”

That made Eric even angrier. “That curse was for you!”

“Too bad then it doesn’t work on me, don’t you think?”

“How can you…? They said you’re weak with fire magic.”

“That’s true,” said Hastur, continuing to admire the yellow lines in his palm. “Never got the hang of it. One thing I’ve learned though is you don’t have to be good with magic at something. You just have to be good.” 

He looked directly at Eric again. “The people who sent you knew how good I am. They sent you to your death. And you’re still protecting them?”

“Yes,” said Eric meekly, but with a spark of pride. 

Hastur sighed deeply.

“Listen, Eric, I did like you. And it was your last wish that we wouldn’t part as enemies. I’ll grant you that. Usually, when I send a guy like you down to Hell I put my mark on them so down there they know who sent him and give him some extra attention. I won’t do that to you. But people who lie to me and try to kill me...”

The hand that currently held the sunburst curse shot forward and now held Eric’s throat. Eric screamed as the curse took hold and an outburst of heat and flames shots up and down from Hastur’s grip.

“… they still go to Hell.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a lot of world-building (world-infodumping rather), but here's a short version of the AU we're in:
> 
> All characters are human, but many of them have some demons somewhere in their ancestry. These humans have magical powers (watered down considerably through the generations), they’re called magic users, or users, for short.
> 
> So of course we’ll get magical crime, and an arm of the police who deals with magical crime.
> 
> Paranormal Investigations (Paravest) is an arm of the British Criminal Investigation Department (CID). 
> 
> I have a lot of thoughts about the magic in the story, but at this point, you only need to know that most users train magic in a system of types, but some don’t, and that there can be big differences in both magical power and magical skill.

Ligur Lorca was ready. Ready for what he knew was going to be the biggest case of his carreer. Nothing about this case was in any way like anything he’d ever done before. And he’d taken on many cases during his twenty-five year carreer as a magical profiler at Paravest. If a case was big, coonected to organized crime, and involved powerful magic users, Inspector Lorca would be there, flanking the CID investigation with his small team of magically trained paranormal investigators.

This time, he had been asked to join someone else’s team. It was unusual that he had been requested, and even more unusual that he had said yes. But how could he not? They were going to investigate a number of truly bizarre magical murders in the town where Professor Lavista lived. Professor Lavista. Holy shit. Ligur still couldn’t believe he would finally meet him.

Professor Lavista’s books had taught him everything that made magic exciting and the work as a paragator dignified.

Ligur had joined Paravest while he had still been a student, at first just to train his magical abilities, then later to become a paragator. And it had been disappointing. 

The traditional system was so… lackluster. So… neat and tidy and everything was in small, small boxes. When he had been a kid he had been so excited that he would have a chance to train his magical talent as an adult. He had dreamt of dragons, of skies full of fire, of diving into the deepest abysses of the ocean, of superhuman strength and speed and superhuman fun. And then it had all been just… rules, and rules, and rules, and a lot of work. 

When he had joined Paravest, the Paranormal arm of the CID, he had been drawn to risky, dangerous cases, which was a bit more exciting. And that had been it. Ligur had done very well in Paravest as a profiler of magical crime scenes, putting his psychology degree and magic skills to good use. And sure, when most criminal magic users were trained as fire types, it was useful to become a water type user. Water and rock. Very useful. Deeply unsatisfying. He still longed for fire, for sky, for the wind over endless planes of grass.

And then Professor Lavista had joined Paravest, or rather, had befallen it, like a force of nature, with his radical theories, brought his new system of understanding and mapping magical energy with him, and it was NOT just another set of small boxes. It wasn’t even bigger boxes, it was no more boxes. It was a bit like what witches did, but much better explained, a complete ethical, scientific and technical approach, an all-emcompassing magical theory that came with some handy ways to detect magical traces at crime scenes, something Professor Lavista had apparently developped digging up ancient curses in Mesopotamia. 

Ligur soaked it all up like a sponge, and something in his brain broke. Broke down and the pieces fit together to form a new picture. Suddenly, magic made sense. Suddenly, his job made sense. Suddenly, his life made sense, well, some sense. 

He took to the new system like a fish to water and it became a cornerstone of his Paravest carreer. He hadn’t personally met Professor Lavista though. He had avoided him, as far as possible. Sure, he had sat in big conference rooms and lecture halls where Professor Lavista had spoken, and he had had indirect contact of sorts through some professional correspondence. But Lavista was, to put it mildly, difficult, and Ligur hadn’t wanted to meet his hero and shatter his illusions. The Professor Lavista who spoke to him through his books was gentle, sad, honest and uplifting. He spoke with the voice of a friend, a friend Ligur could turn to when he was struggling. Every time he felt the job pressing down on him, there would be a poem or a few reflections and thoughts in one of Professor Lavista’s books that lifted him up again. 

The real person didn’t seem to live up to his books. He was relentless, rude, harsh, weird, full of spite, yelled a lot, and no one who had worked with him liked him.

Demon spawn, they called him. That was a bit unfair, pretty much all magic users in the UK owed their abilities to some watered down demon legacy, with some half demon somewhere deep down in their family tree, sometimes hundreds of years back. 

Ligur, born and raised British, had turned out to have demonic heritage from both his Nigerian and Dominican Republican ancestors, to his mother’s embarassment. Demons got around, it seemed. Ligur had enough traces of demon to be a competent magic user, but too little to say how far back the demon influence dated. 

With Professor Lavista, they knew exactly how far back the demon part had come in: four generations. His great-grandfather had been a half demon. The magical power level quickly dropped from one generation to the next, so a line only stayed above the average user level for a few generations and was only considered active if it still could have high-level users born to it. The current active line in Great Britain, the Morningstars, was on its way out. Lavista had turned his back on them long ago. He was an outlier, a paranormal investigator in a family of paranormal criminals. The Morningstars were Paravests biggest problem, they were powerful magic users who deemed themselves above the law and rolled in the money that their crime syndicate, the Hellhounds, brought in.

Lavista had been a Hellhound as a young man, then quit, had been an archeologist, then quit that to work in magical forensics research in the Middle East, had quit that to come back to the UK again, and shortly after that fell out with his terrible family entirely and entered Paravest to spite them. Ten years ago, Lavista had quit Paravest too, surrounded by outrageous rumours, and had settled in Tadfield. And now Ligur was heading there, to investigate a number of very unusual deaths that would inevitably bring him into contact with his biggest personal hero. And he might be here to destroy him. They couldn't prove it yet, but there was no way Professor Lavista wasn't involved in these murders, one way or another.

It was exhilarating, it was terrifying, but it came at the right time. Over the years, Professor Lavista’s books had started losing their shine. Reality had set in at last, cut him in ways that no book could dull again. The job was corrosive. He had always been proud to be a paragator, never regretted the many many hours he had spent on it, the frustration, the sobering moments, the gruesome realities. But his life and his personality had taken damage, slowly at first, but this kind of thing built up. His mum was getting worried, even his grannie had noticed. When was the point where you needed to take a good long look at yourself and ask yourself the inconvenient questions? 

Time for a reality check for everything Ligur’s work had been based on. 

Paranormal Inspector Ligur Lorca was ready. Ready to take the rose-tinted goggles off. Ready to see for himself how bad, how unlikable and soul-crushing the professor was, ready to let go.

Time to break things again and see what the new picture showed. What would the idealism of an old archeologist be worth, when you finally shone the hard life of reality on it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. This is one reason why I’m not doing anything else on AO3 atm. (My dear readers of Harry James Crowley, I am so, so sorry, I have several chapters lined up for you and can’t get the transition to get to them right.)
> 
> This was the story I was swearing I’m not going to post until it’s entirely finished. And it’s not getting there. I really really need a beta-reader for this, so this is why I started posting the first chapters. I have a beta-reader for the worldbuilding, but I also could do with someone who can Britpick it, and I need someone who just comments a bit, just to have a conversation going that helps me keep writing.
> 
> In the faint hope to get a grip of the story, I divided it up into different point of view stories. So this will be the Ligur point of view. I also plan a Gabriel and an Anathema pov, and hope I can get to Aziraphale as well. If someone wants to beta-read one of those, but not this one, please contact me, too.
> 
> You can drop me a message on tumblr (even if you’re not on tumblr, anon is on) where I’m afandomfarfaraway. Sometimes tumblr eats those messages, so if I don’t reply within a few days, maybe try again? Or you can leave a comment if you’re interested (we can always delete it later) and we figure something out.


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